Projections - Team Totals

[Pefacommish]

I downloaded the pitching projections into an excel spreadsheet to play around with them. I sorted the pitchers by team, and out of curiousity, totaled wins, losses, saves and IP by team.

The projection for Arizona, as an example, is a record of 115-83, with 1746 IP.

Gee, those numbers seem high. This is generally the case for all of the teams.

Now I know you guys have a rationale for all of this, so I wonder if you can explain, or point me to it. I need to understand just in what ways I can rely on the projections and in what ways I need to make my own adjustments.

[RAY@HQ]

I ran similar numbers last week for this column. The projections differ by team... ARI is on the high side, other teams are down in the 1400s (IP) range where they should be.

Our playing time projections will converge to more reasonable numbers per team as March goes on, positional battles get sorted out, etc. Between December and Opening Day, we're (as Ron says) "fitting 10 lbs of projections into a 5 lb bag". By late March, we'll be nearly done with that process.

[Michael@HQ]

Using your example, if you go to the Arizona depth chart, the pitchers' playing time projections totals 120%. That's how you can see that the aggregate playing time is going to drop as roles become more clear during spring training. You can also see 110% assigned to catchers and second basemen.

That's a bit of an annoyance that one has to page through all the depth charts to check that, but it may be worth doing if you have a draft coming up soon to identify when playing time is still under or over projected.

Note that if one feels strongly that a trade is likely to occur, then it may make sense to over or under project playing time. Sometimes I think that it'd make for better projections if BBHQ didn't so rigorously adhere to allocating 100% of saves because sometimes one senses that the guy who will lead the club in saves isn't yet a reliever on the roster. (Of course, there's another thread by Patioboater that also has some implications for saves projections too.)